Web document
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Web document is a similar concept to web page, except with the following distinctions:
- a web page is traditionally transferred using the HTTP or the HTTPS protocol;
- a web document may be transferred over any of various Internet communication protocols for use in various kinds of client applications;
- a web page is ordinarily restricted to connote HTML, XHTML or another markup language as the primary presentation specficiation;
- a web document may consist of any type of document type or MIME Content-Type or file format;
- a web document may consist of a compound document, or an attachment to another document or message; and
- a web document is a more expansive definition, which includes the traditional definition for 'web page'.
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[edit] Example
A PDF document requested from SFTP or SMTP protocols, for example, is a web document, but not a web page.
[edit] Motivations
The web document distinction emphasizes the fact that not all content generated by a web template system, web service, and other related systems represents output as a web page.
[edit] Protocol-independent
The e-mail protocols predates the Web protocols, but is not a subset, they constitute distinct Internet services. E-mail documents may be HTML documents, and may be viewed into a e-mail client or through a webmail (or Internet forum) as a web page. A lot of web applications deal with web page bodies and e-mail bodies indistinctly. Web applications deal with web pages, but also with many other formats and protocols.
[edit] Current trends toward XML
From a long-term perspective, the increasing prevalence of XML may eliminate the need for this kind of distinction.
For example:
- Web standards have evolved and become more adaptive toward XML (HTML, for example, can also be expressed as XHTML);
- XML-based OpenDocument specifications (for desktop applications like Open Office) provide an open mechanism for specifying formerly "binary-only" filetypes in plain text (or as binary files of archived text).
Under such trends, the concept of web document becomes more uniform as more file types become expressible as different dialects of XML.
[edit] Appearance of terms
The term "Web Document" appears in Google searches, "Internet document", appears less frequently.
[edit] Dynamic web document
Another extended (derived) concept is dynamic web document, like documents generated from |template engines or web services. Dynamic web page is a specific case of dynamic web document.
The term "Dynamic Web Documents" is on the title of scientific articles, like on article1 or article2.
